Monday, October 10, 2016

I just got a request from a journalist to comment on the notion that archaeologists are now finding that ancient societies may have been more egalitarian than archaeologists had once thought. Here is a pretty close version of my response:

First, it doesn’t mean much to say that ancient societies were more or less
egalitarian than we had thought. For hunter-gatherers and small-scale farmers,
the situation is the reverse. Traditional models held them to be egalitarian,
and we now know that many cases (but far from all) had significant levels of
inequality. Some of the papers in our recent Amerind symposium show this. While
this isn’t a particularly new idea, it has taken scholars some time to
acknowledge this, and we now have better quantitative data.

For state-level societies, I don’t
know of any overall scholarly trend of saying things were more or less unequal than
thought previously. We now know that there was tremendous variation in how
ancient states were organized. One trend, though, is that scholars (and the
public, and certainly the National Geographic Society) used to think all
ancient kings were autocratic and despotic, ruled their people with an iron
fist, and controlled everyone’s life. Pyramids built by slaves being whipped by
overseers was a common image. Few archaeologists will admit to this view, but they
dress it up in fancy theoretical terms (Foucaultian power, hegemony, and such)
that say the same thing: ancient rulers tried to control everyone's life.

The biggest advance in understanding ancient
states in the past few decades is Blanton and Fargher’s 2008 book.They show that premodern states
(all of their cases are based on historical or ethnographic data, not archaeological) can be arranged
along a continuum from autocratic to collective. They have rigorous methods of
measuring their scale in each of 30 societies, and they have a theory that explains the variation. Basically, if
you have to tax your subjects, then you must be nice to them, provide public
goods and not be too tyrannical; these are more collective regimes. But if your
revenue comes from outside (say, from trade or conquest), then you can treat your
subjects like dirt, and be despotic. There is a counter-intuitive element
here, which is that collective regimes mess with people’s lives to a great
degree (to count them, tax them, and keep track of things) than do autocratic
regimes. This is what Michael Mann calls infrastructural power. Despots leave people alone, they don’t try to control their lives;
they just don’t care what their subjects do. Many archaeologists still have not gotten
the word about this, and they still claim that autocratic tyrants in the past were
trying to control everyone, which is really quite a silly idea when you have read the literature.

Unforetunately, Blanton and Fargher's model has
taken a long time to get established. I don’t fully understand why, although it
might be due to the fact that some parts of archaeology has become very post-modern and humanities-oriented, with fashionable social theory being more important than
scientific methods and data. Blanton and Fargher are scientific and empirical,
so lots of archaeologists ignore their work for that reason alone.

The implication of this for the basic question (about levels of inequality in the past) is that it seems to be the case that more collective regimes are
associated with lower levels of social inequality than are more autocratic
regimes. This is certainly the case for the modern world (democracies have less
inequality than dictatorial regimes, etc.). But for the premodern world, this
association has yet to be established conclusively. Unfortuantely, Blanton and Fargher do not address the question of levels of inequality. Our Amerind seminar project may
support it – but that will depend on some synthetic data analysis that is only
just now starting. So, IF this association of regime type with inequality holds
up for ancient times, then the recognition that collective regimes were far
more widespread than thought (i.e., collective rule did not begin all of a sudden in
Athens), does suggest that many ancient state socieites had lower
levels of social inequality. But the proof is in the pudding, and I’m not
willing to come out and declare this conclusion until we have analyzed the
data.

Also, there is an ideological
element to claims of lower inequality in the past. It is true that
archaeologists are now working more on houses and households, not just
considering kings and pyramids. And one common tendency is to claim that these
ancient people we study were more successful and independent and prosperous
that we used to think. But given that our old models were completely
unrealistic pictures of domination and suppression, the new ideas are due less
to new findings than to theoretical fashions and changes.

That said, I do think I have made
a case for prosperous Aztec commoners in my book, At Home with the Aztecs.
Check out the book’s website for some journalistic articles and publicity that
covers some of the content. http://smithaztecbook.wikispaces.asu.edu/

About Me

I am an archaeologist who works on Aztec sites and Teotihuacan.I do comparative and transdisciplinary research on cities, and also households, empires, and city-states. I view my discipline, archaeology, as a Comparative Historical Social Science.
My home pageMy papers to downloadMy page on Academia.edu
Twitter: @MichaelESmith
I am Professor in the School of Human Evolution & Social Change at Arizona State University; Affiliated Faculty in the School of Geographical Science and Urban Planning; Fellow, ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems; Core Faculty in the Center for Social Dynamics Complexity. Also, I have an affiliation with the Colegio Mexiquense in Toluca, Mexico.